Six Top Trends Converging to Destroy the World

If you’re not tired already of hearing the phrase “perfect storm” bantered around with reckless abandon… a recent piece, “The Perfect Storm: Six Trends Converging on Collapse” could be just up your alley.

Despite the unfortunate title, it’s the kind of article you’d expect to cover the global selloff, collapse of the euro, and so forth. Fortunately it’s not. It’s all the other forces bent on destroying the world, and it’s actually worth a look. Below is a short highlight from each of the six top trends.

From The Huffington Post:

Climate Change: with a 90% degree of certainty, the world’s top scientists believe that our planet’s climate is changing at an accelerating pace, that these changes are caused by man, and will have increasingly severe consequences for our world.

Peak Oil: Our global economy and culture are built largely upon a reliance on cheap oil… in April the US military issued a report saying, “By 2012 surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach 10 million barrels per day.”

Collapse of the World’s Oceans: with 11 out of 15 of the world’s major fisheries either in collapse, or in danger of collapse, our world’s oceans are in serious trouble!

Deforestation: Over 50% of the world’s forests have already disappeared, and much of the rest is in threatened. Deforestation contributes approximately 25% of all global greenhouse gasses, nearly double the 14% that transportation and industry sectors each contribute.

The Global Food Crisis: Soils, Weather and Water. For the first time since the “green revolution” started, our world is producing less food each year, yet its population continues to rise as we lose more top soil, arable land, and have less water for irrigation.

Over Population: This is the elephant in the room that few are talking about. In the last decade, we have added more people to the population of our planet than were added between the births of Jesus and Abraham Lincoln… There is simply no way we can achieve a sustainable future unless our population stops growing and starts shrinking.

One could debate at least a few, if not all, of the points above. However, the reality is that alongside the potential collapse of the worldwide fiat currency system, there are a number of serious global problems gaining in severity and that are yet to be tackled. You can visit The Huffington Post to read the much longer and more detailed coverage of the perfect storm to gain additional perspective on the current state of the planet.

Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance.

He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.